Germania remembered
16/08/2013
A new book, Germania Remembered 1500–2009. Commemorating and Inventing a Germanic Past, co-edited by Dr Nicola McLelland (German) and Dr Christina Lee (English), and with a foreword by Tom Shippey, examines how German, English and Scandinavian scholars, writers and artists have invoked the remote history of Germany in order to bolster their ideas about what it …
The Mysterious Constance Farrington
06/08/2013
When people talk about translations, they usually do one of two things: either, they treat the translation as if it wasn’t a translation, talking about it as if it were a carbon copy of the original, or else they criticise the translation, bemoaning what is ‘lost’. This has certainly been the case for Constance Farrington’s …
German literature rediscovers Germany’s neglected colonial history
15/07/2013
In the late 1990s, a surge of historical novels about German colonialism in Africa and its previously neglected legacies hit the German literary scene. Accelerated by the centenary in 2004 of Germany’s colonial war in South-West Africa and the genocide of the Herero, this development has continued to the present, making colonialism an established theme …
Windows on War: An Online Poster Exhibition
19/06/2013
In 1969 as part of the legacy of Vivian de Sola Pinto (formerly Professor of English) the University acquired a rare collection of Soviet posters from WWII. These posters were hand-made almost every day during the war to keep the population abreast of progress, to maintain morale and attack the enemy. Yes, they are propaganda, …
Malaysia’s General Election Stand-off: Will the revolution be web-streamed?
22/05/2013
Malaysia’s general election on 5th May has seen the world’s longest-incumbent elected government claim another term of office, yet appears also to have radically, perhaps permanently, altered the country’s political culture. After the closest and most bitter electoral contest in national history, the victory of the Barisan Nasional coalition, in power since 1957, has been …
General Election 13 in Malaysia: The view from UNMC
04/05/2013
Following on the success of the University’s Tri-Campus Language Teaching Conference in September, a second gathering of staff working in Modern Languages and Cultures from all three University of Nottingham campuses was held in Malaysia last week. A UK delegation, led by Professor Judith Still, Head of the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies, …
Postwar American Fiction and the State of the Novel: Reflections on the Rise of Creative Writing
30/04/2013
Creative writing programmes have been part of the higher education system in the US and beyond for more than 60 years. Arguments about whether one can be taught to write are of equally longstanding. Are writers romantic figures with intuitive skills whose work thrives with exposure to worldly experience? Or can people be trained to …
Possession marking: ’s and beyond
14/03/2013
One of the most widely studied elements of the Germanic languages is the ’s which attaches to a noun phrase to indicate possession in English. The analysis of this element, the possessive ’s, has been the object of much debate in linguistics on account of its unusual behaviour, which makes its categorisation problematic. It can …
Social media and democracy: events in the Centre for Critical Theory
13/03/2013
In recent years, big claims have been made about the political potential of new media and social networking, from Obama’s use of Facebook in his 2008 election campaign to the alleged role of smartphones in the so-called ‘Arab Spring’. We hear constantly about the ‘digital revolution’ and the ‘democratizing’ effects it can have. But can …
Mali, Terrorism, and US Foreign Policy
12/03/2013
In January 2013, David Cameron announced that British intelligence officers, Special Forces soldiers, aircraft and surveillance drones would all be deployed to ‘dismantle’ terrorist groups based in northern Mali, and called for a generational commitment to rout terrorist groups from the Sahel region. In fact, such an effort has been ongoing for the past decade …
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